We Make Today

Instagram wanted to celebrate the communities shaping culture on the platform, and to show rather than claim that culture moves forward there every day. Platform brand campaigns routinely claim cultural relevance, so Instagram needed to demonstrate the claim rather than assert it. The insight was that culture on Instagram is made daily by creators, so a campaign about that had to be made at the same speed, one day at a time.

Ogilvy New York's answer was We Make Today, a social experiment producing seven films in seven consecutive days, each built from creator content and released the same day it was made. From November 16 to 22, 2020, Instagram invited 120 creators to interpret a daily single-word theme, confidence, inspiration, humor, unexpected, belonging, euphoria and change. Ogilvy New York edited the submissions into a 30-second film in about five hours including legal vetting, each clip went live before the next day began, and a minute-long hero film set the tone. Content was pulled from different countries to use time zones within each day's window.

The work held together because heavy preparation, test edits, dress rehearsals and pre-selected music, made the speed possible, and the production process was itself the proof of the brand claim. Human editing was a deliberate positioning choice over automation. The campaign ran on Instagram. It completed the seven-films-in-seven-days format and drew trade press coverage, but no reach, engagement or business metrics were disclosed in available sources, so its effectiveness with audiences cannot be assessed.